Work at the Speed of Lights, Camera, Action – Assemble.tv Project Management Tool
In our video production industry the only constant seems to be change. The landscape of the who, what, when & where is in constant flux. At least now we’re seeing some awesome improvements in the availability of digital tools that streamline the entire production process. We’ll be diving into one such solution (Assemble.tv) which we believe is worth your time to explore with us. As always please bring your questions so that we can learn together.
Panelists
Transcripts from talk
Sarah Marince:
Hello everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to crew talk brought to you by shoots.video. I’m Sarah Marince and we have a smaller panel with us today, but that’s okay because we’re going to talk about a lot of information. So I’m gonna kind of go down the line of who I see on my screen and introduce everyone here. We have first Blake. Hi Blake, happy Wednesday.
Blake Barnett:
I’m Blake. I run Blare Media, a production company, as well as a shoots.video, which is a production community. And I kind of want to say, this is Blake and I’m done speaking.
Sarah Marince:
Last week. Yes. And for those who are tuning in last week, we were on clubhouse and it was so much fun. It was a lot of fun. And I know Blake, you guys are going to continue doing stuff on clubhouse Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yeah. Four o’clock Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Sarah Marince:
But yeah, but for today we’re going to continue. And for these overcast, we’re going to continue doing them here on zoom, which is great. Because it gives me a reason once a week to actually get dressed up from here up. But, and next we have Nate and Nate is actually we’re going to be talking about Nate and his company today, but hello, Nate?
Nate Watkin:
Hello. Thank you for having me excited to be here. I am. I am the CEO of assemble and I’m looking forward to chatting.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. Well, we are looking forward to chatting with you and last but not least, we have Joel. Hi Joel.
Joel Janecek:
Yeah. Excited to be here. I’ve been producing video and making content for, you know, 20 years and it’s exciting to see all the different tools that are coming out nowadays. And so happy to be talking about assemble.
Sarah Marince:
Yes, very cool. We’re happy that you’re on the panel with us today. So we have a lot of questions and we’re going to dive in, but as always for everyone tuning in, if you have any questions along the way, throw them into the chat box and we’ll get them, we’ll get to them, you know, as we’re going along here. But yeah, just throw them in and we’ll be glad to answer them. But Nate CEO of assemble, can you just kind of give us a little backstory as to what assemble is?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, definitely. I think maybe starting with my own backstory would help lay the groundwork a little bit. I was actually a content producer for eight years. Ran my own production company, doing branded content commercials, music videos based out of Venice, California, and you know, was a producer director got my hands, sturdy, everything from pre all the way through posts and really just understand, you know, the, the industry and the way it works inside out. And it’s a classic case of solving your own problem. And you know, I think when I was running a production company and we were juggling, you know, dozens of projects all at once, we were always looking for that project management tool that would make our lives easier. And we tried, you know, all the usual suspects, you know base camp Trello you know, a lot of names that I’m sure people are familiar with.
Nate Watkin:
And it was always just like fitting a square peg into a round hole. You know, we could never find something that really fit. And we always just ended up reverting back to email and phone and, you know, Google docs and, you know, most of the things that all the producers tend to use. And so when I began to transition into tech and start to get really involved in the tech industry, I knew what I wanted to build right away. And that was a project management solution for content creation. And I think that content creation is just exploding as an industry, especially over the last 10 years is becoming so important. You know, content is eating the world literally. And we to this day, I’m shocked that there’s no industry standard project management platform that is widely accepted by the majority of this industry. And so that’s our goal. And we set out, started this company a little over four years ago, have been developing this product and still and the private beta over the last year. And we finally launched publicly at the beginning of this year and are excited to bring it to the world.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. I mean, I was on the site earlier and kind of was watching the demo video of just how it all works and it’s brilliant and so easy to use from, you know, everything I saw and you can really do everything on, on the platform. You really can. I mean, you can from start to finish, you know, you’re handling your whole project. We can send messages, create this, you know, it’s calendars, it’s, it is everything. And I’m sure we’re going to get more into that. But so the, really the reason you created it was to just kind of make it easier for everyone, right?
Nate Watkin:
It’s all about ease and simplicity for us. And thank you so much for the company. And I appreciate that. We put a lot of hard work into that our product teams. So but yeah, exactly. We want a tool, a one-stop shop for pre to post. Not only for you before your clients, your vendors, everybody that you work with so that you, they have one branded experience with your company and everything is all in one place. That’s goal number one, goal. Number two is to make it as simple and intuitive as possible because we all know the headaches of trying to onboard a client on a new technology. You know, there’s always a learning curve or some sort of hassle, or they just don’t like using it or whatever that may be. So it’s been our goal from the very beginning is how can we make this as simple as possible, as easy to understand so that anybody that you’re inviting to a product to a project can understand it quickly, but also so that you can just implement it on day one for your company. There’s no complicated setups. You have to you know, find templates for your industry or things of that nature. It is works day one out of the box, you’re up and running.
Sarah Marince:
That’s awesome. So who would benefit most from using this platform?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, I would say a lot of our customers are, you know, boutique production companies you know, like just like myself in my past life. So we have, you know, boutique production companies that are shooting commercials or episodic or you know, music videos, or a variety of different things like that is a lot of our customers, but then it really anybody with a producer title. So, you know, we work with agencies with their in-house producing teams. We work with brands with their in-house producing teams, anybody that’s producing content, this is going to make their life easier.
Sarah Marince:
Like, I’m sure you have something to add. You know, you’ve been in this for quite a while, right.
Blake Barnett:
To me, I’m like, it would have been great cause we have, we use Wipster and I see that you have like a, like a Wipster or a frame IO style tool to me and I’m wondering, and this is something I haven’t talked to you about. And I don’t know if this is a thing that you’re thinking about doing or like, it’d be great if we had like a, a contact form. Cause right now we use HubSpot. And so clients, you know, we use HubSpot like on our website, they fill out the form and, but we don’t really use HubSpot. Like it’s supposed to be used. We really just use it as a way to assign to the right staff to follow up. And after that, like pretty much don’t use HubSpot. So I’m wondering if you’re thinking about including or maybe already have, I don’t know. If you think about a tool to have like a contact form to get them in to get our clients in the system to start a project, or is it more like we do a regular path and then once we get like a signed agreement, then we incorporate like, and then can we then if that’s the case, can we just put them on to to assemble like a like an easy way instead of just manually?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a great idea and a great point. And I would say currently assemble is, you know, pre to post is, is where we live. So we’re the collaboration tool. We give you the calendars, the timelines, the task lists, the files, sharing feedback, everything that you need from, you know, the creative kickoff, all the way until final delivery to make it happen. We haven’t gotten too much into the sales space, like the CRM, you know, we, we use HubSpot to actually, I love HubSpot. But we haven’t gotten too much into that field just cause there’s so many great tools like HubSpot out there. But we are working on a lot of things that will enable you to customize forms and customize ways that you receive input from clients. So, you know, that’s kind of on the future roadmap, but there are going to be some elements of that.
Nate Watkin:
With that being said, we do see assemble serving as your white labeled client login. So once you kick off a project, you know, our goal is that on your website, if it’s Blair media, for instance, you have a client login, they click that. It goes to a branded page with Blair media logo. And essentially they can log into a backend that’s basically built in, you know hosted by assemble, but it provides you all of those tools. So that’s how we view assemble ultimately is your end to end collaboration tool for that process.
Blake Barnett:
So, okay. So let’s dive into that a little bit deeper. So like say I have a client like Blair media.net forward slash client login and they go there and then is there, do you have anything I, I put there or do, it’s just like a link, like how does that process work for me? Do I embed something on that page? Like we use WordPress as our thing, we just like, is there a plugin or widget that we use to do that? Or how do we white labeled from so they don’t even know that assemble exists.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, so you, you would just have URL and I should note that white labeling is currently in beta, so it’s not live yet, but it will be soon, but essentially you’ll have your own unique link, like Blair media dot, assembled that TV. And then you can just straight from your website, let’s say you have a client login button, they click that. It goes to that login page with your logo, they sign in and they’re inside and everything is branded for your company from,
Blake Barnett:
We can put like our logo and kind of customize a little bit for blur media.
Nate Watkin:
Yep. Everything down to email notifications is going to come with your logo on it. So it’s a fully, fully white labeled experience.
Blake Barnett:
What about is the, I noticed some like your platform. There’s not a lot of color scheme in general, which is good for white labeling, but is that part of it too? You, can we kind of like change the color scheme to kind of match? Or is it just the logo?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, we haven’t gotten into that too much yet. You know, it’s just kind of clean, simple interface like white and, you know, we like to keep everything clean. Design-Wise currently
Blake Barnett:
Sarah. Oh, Joel. Do you, do you have anything to add here?
Joel Janecek:
No. I mean I was enjoying looking through your site and I like how you sort of show on the site, like what, what you were replacing. You’re like, okay, this tool replaces, Google drive and this tool or places, you know, emails or something like that. You know, I think, you know, when you get into project management for video, it’s kind of complex, you know, and we were dealing with a lot of different types of clients, you know, and I’m always sort of looking for like a one-stop shop. You know, where I can have like, you know, approvals from a different client. Cause like sometimes we’ll have clients that are, you know, like sort of the hip people at an advertising agency and they need to approve like a number of different locations, but at the same time or, or like talent approval is very hard, I’ve found.
Joel Janecek:
And I do, I do a fair amount of casting and it’s like, how do I, you know, just give a bunch of different images, give feedback from someone, okay. That’s not quite right. Especially with commercial casting being, you know, going back and forth on a casting sheet all end up sending like 10 different PDF to someone, you know? So how maybe if you can explain like some of the key or, you know, telling me about some of the key success stories you’ve had and where you know, the specifics of your tool have really improved workflow, whether it’s casting or communication with, with different types of clients at different levels of tech savviness.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That’s a great question. I think, you know, the, the main improvement that we give to people’s process is the concept of a digital production book. And currently everybody’s got files floating around everywhere, right? Like every producer is using four or five different tools. So you’ve got like Dropbox and frame and email attachments and, you know, we transfer download links and it everything’s floating everywhere. And you’re trying to keep feedback you know probably mostly an email, but you’re getting on phone calls and you know, it’s a mess, right? And so what assemble does is it brings all those assets together in one place, organizes it in a digital production book and then enables you to easily share it with anybody. So you can invite people to, to join and create an account, or if you don’t want them to create an account, you can just share revealings with them.
Nate Watkin:
They can access those review links with no account. They can leave feedback you know, time coded feedback, all sorts of different tools to enable them to give really accurate feedback. And then that’s all funneled to one place. For casting, we have a specific casting app or function that I would call it where you can actually create roles. And then you define the role, you know, what, what that role needs to be. And then you add all your actors submissions, and you can send the roles to, to the client. They can go through look at each cast member, multiple photos, videos, if you have a casting tapes and they just approved the one that they like, and that role shows up as approved in assemble. So it’s really just about synthesizing this all into one place
Joel Janecek:
And that’s going to the client as a, just a browser interface or do they have to, sorry, you broke up there a little, that’s going as a browser to face the client. There’s no special software on their end. No attachment. I know that it’s like, okay, I I’m dealing with the person who’s been asked to get a quote or to is, is sort of coordinating the casting, but they’re really not the decision maker. And so like nine times out of 10, like a simple PDF is going to suffice for them, but then it’s like, which version of that PDF do they send it? Oh, they liked that one guy or which, which one was the one. So obviously I I’m sure you dealt with that too. So it’s like, but, but no, one’s going to up for a new piece or anything
Nate Watkin:
And create a password or any of that, you know? So it’s like bridging that simplicity of like, here’s this PDF with like the functionality of software, you know, like, so it sounds like it is just browser based. Yeah. And the great thing is, is they don’t have to create an account to access assets and leave feedback and approvals so they can Mark someone as approved. All they have to do is leave a name. They don’t even have to enter their email address. We just need to know who they are. And the other great thing about assemble is that everything is tracked. So there’s paper trail, anytime somebody approves something, it’s going to show up in your notification feed, which you can access at any time. So you always know who approved what, and when, which as producers, we know this is super important to have that confirmation in writing somewhere. So we also handle all of that as well.
Blake Barnett:
So to, to, to further go on that with the, the casting information, we would just send like a link to it. Like we would like in the user interface, like what we’re looking, we would just like create a link and then share that link on an email to the client and the client click on a link and they’ll be able to view the, the casting casting selections.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, exactly. I can even just share my screen real quick. It’s easier to get a visual. Yeah. Would that be helpful? Yeah. Yeah. Let me pull it up real quick. I won’t go too deep into a full demo here, but I think it would be helpful to show you where did I just go? Cool. Can you guys see my screen? The good evening Simon at the top? Yep. Cool. This is our interface. And once again, I won’t go too deep along with, Oh, no worries. Along the left side, these are what we call your phases. And this is kind of like your digital production binders. So you may have creative phase casting phase shoot edit. This is where you organize all your assets. You can upload any type of assets. So if we’re talking about casting, we have what we call roll cart, roll cards, and you can basically create one of these for each role, put a description of what this role needs to be.
Nate Watkin:
You know, all the way down to like gender age range, ethnicity, hair, color, et cetera. And then you can add these submissions to it. So once your clients get this, they just click in. They can look through a actor, let me move this. You can have multiple photos, videos, everything within there. And they can basically just kind of come in here and select whoever that they want to approve. So let’s say we approve her. That approval is tracked. So, you know, who approved it and when, and in this role card is not approved. So it just, it’s a really clean way to keep track of everything that’s going on. And it works the exact same way for locations as well when you’re sending location options to clients also. Yeah.
Blake Barnett:
Is it possible to add some sort of like link to the reel or something? You know, that’s what our clients typically like, like I see their headshot, but I don’t want to see them in action acting. Is there a way to put them for real in,
Nate Watkin:
You can upload their real so that you would have a video that would play directly and in there once they, they were scrolling through the photos or if you have audition tapes or anything, you can upload those as well. Okay. but I mean, you can also, and then on top of that, you can also just always leave a comment. So if you want to just over here in the comments, just drop and say, Hey, here’s the link to their reel. You can drop it in right there as well.
Blake Barnett:
That’s probably easier just to me, instead of uploading the actual video file, just to put a quick link to YouTube or Vimeo. Okay. So what, how do I share this? Like right now, I think you maybe did it already, but I just sent the invite button or
Nate Watkin:
That’s if you, yeah. If you want to invite somebody to the project, you just share directly right there. But if you want to share a file so let’s pull up like a video file here. You clicked share share private review link, and this gives you a, so there’s a few options, but let’s just go ahead and create that link. And right here, you get a unique URL for that link. You could add a password if you want to add password protection, but essentially you can also send that link to anybody and they won’t have to create an account to log in. And from this view, they’ll see this file. They can leave comments, they can set the approval status everything with, without having to have an account. So clicking on it,
Joel Janecek:
Video and leaving a comment at specific places is currently integrated like a frame IO. Or did you build this?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, we built this. Yeah. This is our software. Sorry, I’m trying to get this get this thing on the way. So we do have frame specific commenting, so clients can come in here, drop a, drop a comment. That’s going to go directly on the frame. We are working on adding annotations, so you’ll be able to leave, you know more specific notes on the actual frame. But right now we do have frame specific commenting version control and approval status settings,
Joel Janecek:
Back and forth in a dialogue. I want to remove the cutting board from this scene. Okay, great. That’s going to take an extra couple of days to Rodo that out or whatever, and replace that. Are you okay with that? And that’s all happening. Yep.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Just, just sit and reply here. You can just reply to any feedback you can also tag people. Do you want to tag specifically for the project
Joel Janecek:
And on each one of those edits and here’s the next version?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is that’s actually launching this week, but yeah, it will, we’ll have the ability to Mark each comment as done so that you can basically show the clients which comments have been completed itself. Keep an eye out for that this week. And then yeah. You upload V2 and then you get a new comment thread and then you’re up and running on the next version. Somebody just asked in the chat box, our comments appearing in real time. Or do you need to refresh real-time yeah. Yeah. Those are in real time. Very cool, man.
Blake Barnett:
I’m still on the casting portion and we kind of skipped ahead video portion. I could say I wanted to back. I wanted to know, like if we had like four people for one role, how do we share all four? Did we select this files? Like, Oh, I was just kind of curious how that works.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. So let me, unapprove her real quick. So this is where you can add as many actor options as you want to this role. So you could add 20, you could add a hundred, whatever that is
Blake Barnett:
On their picture and opens up their actual, like more information about them or,
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. So it’s gonna open up I only have one picture in here, but if you had 10 photos and say some videos, you would have a scroll, scroll arrows here and you could scroll through. And then, yeah, you can also add more information if you want to drop a comment in terms of specific
Blake Barnett:
To that or that person.
Nate Watkin:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, this will be a feedback threads specifically around that that role.
Blake Barnett:
And so how do we share that this, just this role, like just this, like say this is casting for this role. How do we just share this, this?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. So that feature to be able to share role cards is actually coming in the next couple of weeks. Currently you can share any type of file right now. So PDFs, photos, videos audio file. But these role cards, we’re still building the functionality, share those. So keep an eye out for that in the next couple of weeks. And you’ll be able to share these as public links as well. Nice
Joel Janecek:
Location. Is it similar to the casting? Do you have them like the multiple pictures? Cause I know that for me, when I build these location sheets, I’m always like commenting under each specific picture. Like this classroom is okay, but it doesn’t have anything on the walls. It’s about, you know, 500 square feet. This it’s also like going to be, you know, quite far from where we can park, you know, all that kind of stuff. So it’s like, if you want to choose this one, just know here’s the like cons against this particular spot. I mean, it looks like you just have like regular text integration. But yeah, so I can downtown loft. I can write unlimited kind of underneath that or like offer location specific or like this, this image is great. This is looking East. So we’re going to get like we’re not going to, it’ll be good for shooting in the later afternoon. So we’re not getting sun coming through the windows, like that kind of thing.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah. Currently there’s, there’s just one comment thread per location, but when we launch annotations, I think that’ll be a great way to do that because you’ll be able to just click on the photo and drop a comment specific to that photo.
Joel Janecek:
Kind of give so much, usually the location documents I make are for the client and they’re also for the director slash you know, so it’s like they can, everyone needs to get on the board at the same time. Clients gotta be like MCAT. I’m comfortable with these locations, I’m representing my brand. And then, you know, DP and director have to make decisions about, okay, when do, when do we shoot here? You know, what’s my setup going to be like, do I need any special stuff with me? That sort of thing, you know? Yeah.
Nate Watkin:
Right, right. Yup. Yeah. So I think, I think once those annotations go live, that’ll be super helpful for that because you know, you’re clicking here saying, Hey, great light coming in from the windows or,
Joel Janecek:
And it’d be great if we could like track that conversation. So it could be like, no, you guys already asked me and here it is. I told you,
Sarah Marince:
We do have a couple of questions from the Q and a box. Tony wants to know, how would you compare assembly to frame IO for those of us who have used frame IO, what would be the reasons to move to assembly?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Great question. And frame IO, great platform. We love, we love the frame team and what they’re doing. I would say that assemble, you know, our goal is to be an end to end project management tool. And so while frame IO is great at video collaboration and feedback and stuff, we want to give you all the features you need from, from start to finish. So, you know, that starts with the calendar. We have a very advanced calendar builder where you can switch between month view and a timeline view and just really see your entire project coming to life. And that, yeah. And then going into tasks management. So we’ve got a full task management capabilities within the platform.
Joel Janecek:
It’s, it’s really important, you know, the calendar, how do you share it? Like that’s not on assemble. You’re like, do you want to share it with the crew? Or how does that process work?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. So that’s one of the great things about assemble. You know, one of the biggest problems that producers have is it’s sharing the calendar and getting everybody on the same calendar because everybody uses like Google Cal account ICL, outlook, all these different tools. And so we’ve really solved that in a way we do that is you click the share button up here and you create a shareable link. Once again, this is publicly viewable. You can add a password if you want. And essentially what’s, what’s going to happen is that, let me go to an incognito window and go to be a logged out user so I can show you exactly what they’re going to see. So if you share this public link of the calendar, then essentially they’re just gonna get a page that invites them to just enter the password. If a password is required, they don’t need to log in.
Nate Watkin:
They don’t need to create an account nothing. They just enter that. And then they’re in here. They can view the calendar, they can talk about the views so they can see, you know, both the timeline view and the month view, if they want, they can open events and see tasks and, you know, conversations, they can even join the conversation if they want without an account. But the great part from here is they click the sync button and then they can choose to sync this to Google, Apple, or Microsoft. And what that means is that once you share this public link and ask everybody to sync it to their platform of once you’re back inside the calendar. So let’s say we’re a logged in user. Now, if I move a locate or sorry, if I move an event, that’s going to update across everybody’s calendars, regardless of whether they have an assemble account or not. And regardless of what calendar app they’re using. So it really just gives you one centralized hub where you can let everybody connect to it the way that they want.
Blake Barnett:
That’s, that’s a really cool feature. Cause I’ve talked to some other like freelancers and what they’ve been doing, and what I’ve heard is they basically share their calendar and they just get a calendar invite and they either accept it or don’t because they, you know, they’ll send it to multiple people and whoever accepts it almost first, or if they don’t, I’ll give him a little bit of time probably, but this would be really cool because it doesn’t really matter what calendar they’re on and they don’t have to, you know, share each other’s calendars in that same way to just send them that link and they can edit to their own, their own calendar. I think, I think that’s cool. I like, I like this feature. That’s pretty cool.
Sarah Marince:
We do have more questions. Our Q and a box is pop in is the user interface responsive to various form factors as mobile and tablet?
Nate Watkin:
Mobile, mobile responsiveness is coming the first the first mobile responsiveness features we’ll be rolling out next month. So keeping an eye out for that as well. We are definitely working on making this fully mobile responsive and in the future, we’ll probably be launching iPhone and Android apps as well.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. That’s great. And then Brian wants to know what is the pricing plan? Is it monthly yearly? Yeah,
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, totally. So our pricing plans are monthly. You can cancel any time. They started at $19 per month and then you can upgrade your storage depending on how much storage that you need. One of the great things about our, our platform is you can invite unlimited users. So once you have an account, you can invite your clients, your vendors, anybody that you want to collaborate with. And there’s no additional charge per user.
Sarah Marince:
Oh, that’s great. That’s really, that’s very cool. Okay. So Perrin wants to know, wondering if there are future plans to include budget and call sheet templates
Nate Watkin:
Definitely in the works. Yeah, absolutely. In the works you know, we’re going to be doing it our own way. We really like to look at how things are being done and think about how can we do this better for producers. So, you know, we are definitely working on that, getting a lot of feedback from our customers and from other producers and in terms of how they want those types of features to work and those will be being built. So you could probably expect to see some announcements about that in the next couple of months. Yeah. I mean, that’s really, the Holy grail is sort of like getting into an, from the, because I know as I saw you have like releases and some different like forms you know, getting active, I mean obviously studio binder, that’s quite a bit of programming. And then if you combine that with like proposal software where I like, I can, I can reach out w can you give
Joel Janecek:
Us a quote on a shoot and edit, okay, here you go. Here’s, here’s, here’s my prayer amateurs on that. Okay. They say, yes, they check, they check in the assemble box. Great. Now they’re in the assemble pipeline and I’m, you know, when I’m ready for the shoot, I’m putting that call sheet together. And it’s, you know, I’ve sent that out to everyone that I can hit yes. On there. They can click you know, I accepted this call sheet. You can see who got it, who said yes. And that works for mobile on them. I mean, those things are, if I don’t really think about it, cause I’ve been doing it for so long, but you end up getting a lot going on, you know, and I mean, we’re using a thing called massive for file transfer, which works really great. But you know, it’s, there’s a lot happening and a lot, cause video productions really encompass so many different things, you know? So like, you know, we see so many people in the space including ourselves really attempting to like make something that like wraps itself around all those different features. Where are you on your priority level with your next upcoming updates?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, we’re working on a lot of, lot of really exciting stuff. I would say, you know, one thing that’s important to us is to not make the software too rigid. You know, we understand that every, every creative, every producer, every company has their own nuances to how they like to do things and how they like to prepare their documents and how they like to run their processes. And so it’s our goal to not be restrictive at all. We want this, this platform to be modular and to be simple and easy to use, but allow you to use it in your way. We don’t want to say you have to do it the assemble way. This is how the software works. If you don’t like it too bad that’s not our role. And so for us, we’re looking at ways like how can we,
Joel Janecek:
I’ve definitely found myself fighting with your, not to interrupt you, but like there I’m like, I just don’t, I don’t need all this stuff. I’m deleting them, deleting them deleting. And no, I just, just let me type the address in the Google map, integration being mandatory. I wish I could just turn that off. That sort of thing, you know?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s our goal to be modular and allow you to build the components you want and that you want to use, but also to essentially, you know, still use it in the way that you want to use it and not be too rigid. So when it comes to things like call sheets and some of those other documents we’re working on, we’re working on building our own version of that, that we’re, we we’re hopeful. It’s really gonna change the industry and be a lot you know, be a really exciting feature for a lot of people.
Blake Barnett:
I would say, speaking of call sheets, if you can make it so like the address and phone numbers and that kind of stuff is clickable. Cause that’s the problem we run into like they’re flat PDF files and they’re driving and they’re trying to click on an address and they can’t, they got to manually type in this address. And I don’t know, I don’t know, Joel Dino studio binder solve that problem is still a problem with them or was that never a problem
Nate Watkin:
In terms of basically what you get with studiobinder if you, if you choose the SMS option for each person, you send the call sheet to then they’ll, they get a text that has a clickable link for the for the address that, but it always ends up opening a Google maps, but so hopefully you like Google maps, but yeah, that’s, that’s really nice. Cause you know, if you’re running late, you wake up and you’re like, where does that text click it? And then off you go I really enjoy that,
Blake Barnett:
But that’s, that’s only for the address, not for like the individual crew members phone numbers and that
Nate Watkin:
No, no. I mean, that would be pretty, pretty difficult. Yeah. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t have that. You, you would end up, I think if you accessed studio binder, if you went past the confirmation screen to view it live in a browser on your phone, then I think you might be able to click on that a number of per person, but I’m not a hundred percent sure on that.
Blake Barnett:
I was curious. Okay. See, like right now you’re like you said, you’re still working on the eventually maybe building out a call sheet system, but like for now, like say if we have our own call sheet and we, we add it to the project on there and then is there a way then we just like share it to the crew and then can we see that confirmed that everybody’s opened it? Like, is there that kind of process, I’m just kind of curious about how that works.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. So you can upload, you could just add the PDF to the project and then you could share a public link of that. And basically just you can either share the URL or you could just put all their email addresses into the, into the public link and hit send, and it’ll blast it all out to all of them. And then we haven’t yet built the functionality to say like, who has seen it. But you know, if you want to, you can make them drop a comment, say confirmed or got it. But yeah, yeah, that is how we would recommend doing it currently.
Blake Barnett:
And then like how Joel was talking about like, you know, texting, we would, we could just copy that link in the text that link to people. Correct. And they could open up from their phone and that’d be fine.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’re still rolling out the full mobile responsiveness. They could open it, but we’re in next month where we’re starting to roll out some more, really mobile friendly UI. Cool.
Blake Barnett:
Where are we at on questions?
Nate Watkin:
I would say while we were screen-sharing, if you wanted to show us some of your favorite features of assemble, if there was anything else that, you know, you wanted to show people while they could see it here. Yeah. Yeah. I’d love to definitely got sidetracked. Yeah. I didn’t want to hog hog the screen too much. Want to see all your pretty faces, but I’ll jump back in here. I would say, you know, my favorite feature probably of the, the entire platform is the master calendar. So this is your project screen where you have all the projects you’re working on. Each of these projects is like its own production binder. It has its own calendar tasks, lists, assets but all those roll up into the master calendar. So if you come up here to the top and click the master calendar, this is going to show you all of your projects across or sorry, all your calendars across all your projects.
Nate Watkin:
Now you can drill down here on the month view and just focus in on the specific calendars that you want to look at. But probably my favorite view and feature of the whole platform is this timeline view on the master calendar, because what this does is it gives you a full visual of your entire production workload across all the projects that you’re working on. And this is just to me, such a powerful view, to be able to see everything all in one place in this visual style. And it, it really helps to see conflicts as well as you can see here also each project, it shows you the timeline and the deadlines. So it shows you the progress and how far you are away from those deadlines. One cool thing that we just added is you can click on this and add a, what we call emoji milestones.
Nate Watkin:
So let’s say you have an important milestones, like a shoot, you click here and you can pick from any of these emojis, let’s do this for a shoot and it’s going to drop that emoji right on the timeline. And the reason why this is powerful, you can use it for any sort of like pre-pro meetings or like a travel day or whatever. But the reason why this is powerful is when you’re on this master view, let’s say you use this for every time. You have a shoot really quick and easy to see when shoots are going on and when those important milestones they’re happening and you can even collapse these projects down and just look at the timelines stacked up side by side, which is the milestones visible. So to me, you know, this is super helpful for managing a large production workload and if a feature, a lot of our customers really love.
Sarah Marince:
Hm that’s awesome. Interesting. I like that. I like the emojis. That’s really cool idea. What’s your biggest hurdle of getting, getting this off the ground? What was the biggest thing you had to overcome?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think time, you know, building a project management platform is, is such a massive undertaking and you know, it’s, it’s taken us four years to build this platform and we’ve been doing it kind of itself and developing it under wraps and just, you know, keeping the team and, and the runway and the vision for the company over four years is, is a big challenge when you haven’t even launched. And so since we’ve launched we’ve been growing like crazy signing up tons of new customers every month. And it’s, it’s been really rewarding to hear the customer feedback of, you know, finally, you know, the solution that’s built for us and built for our industry. So that’s been really nice to hear and helps kind of justify all the patients we had to have in order to get this product built and launched.
Blake Barnett:
Speaking of getting a bunch of new customers using your resource, what’s the onboarding process? How does that work when like someone signs up and they’re like, man, this is a little overwhelming because there’s a lot, there’s a lot of tools here. What, what’s your process for onboarding people?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. well, you can really simplify the platform for, for your clients first and foremost. Let’s say you don’t want them to have to create an account at all. You can simply share link to the calendar and they can just click it and view the public link of that account. Or you can share a link to a file. They can click it, review the file and just start leaving feedback directly on it. So that’s probably the simplest way to do it.
Blake Barnett:
And NATO was actually more like for like say if I sign up and I’m confused, like, is there, is there an onboarding for us to, you know, people who actually are subscribing and paying for your services?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s pretty simple. Onboarding just takes you through the process of setting up a project. I think it’s three steps excuse me, slumbering in here. So it’s pretty simple. And then once you’re in the project, we have some really quick tutorial videos, right. At the top. They’re like two minutes long each, I think there’s three of them. I’m confident if you watch those videos, you’re going to do, you’re going to know 90% of the platform because it’s, hopefully we’ve designed it to be very intuitive. So yeah, yeah. But we are actually funnily enough, working on improving our onboarding experience because a feature that we’re launching very, you know, that we’re working on now actually is project templates. So not only the ability for you to select from some pre-made templates, but also the ability for you to create your own templates for a project and save them so that you can reuse them over and over again.
Blake Barnett:
Okay. And I’m not saying I I’m, I’m sure it’s like super user-friendly just anytime you get a new platform, it’s just a little bit of a learning curve of like knowing what you can do and where the buttons are at. Yeah, but I guess if you just watched those videos would probably, you know,
Sarah Marince:
I watched a video before this, I’m trying to learn about it and I could tell you it’s, it was super easy and fun to watch too. I mean, it was like, I was like, Oh, this is cool. This is cool. And I just kept it on and was watching it. And so even for me who doesn’t, you know, own a production company or anything like that I was really into watching it and it was really easy to watch. So yes, I think all the videos would probably be easy. I would guess.
Nate Watkin:
That’s good to hear. That’s great feedback. Thank you. Good job. Thanks.
Blake Barnett:
I think what other, is there a question, sir? Do you see questions on our list that we kind of put together that we’ve missed? Maybe?
Sarah Marince:
Yeah, there are a few, we covered a lot of stuff and I mean, I think somebody asked, you know, how assemble is different, you know, from other companies that are similar. And you know, we covered the benefits that customers gain from using assemble, but what would you say your long-term vision is for assemble?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, definitely. You know, we, we see assemble as first and foremost, a very open collaborative platform. Like we want to make it as easy as possible to, to share the platform with others, to invite people and to collaborate with others. We’re all about removing any sort of barriers or friction. And in line with that, you know, we realized there are a lot of great tools out there as well that people love to use. We have great relationships with a lot of companies that are developing, you know, really great software for payroll or for booking locations and booking talent or, or things of that nature where we necessarily don’t necessarily ever want to go in as a company. But what we want to do is become a hub where we can connect to all the tools that you love and run the core of your projects on assemble, but be able to connect freely within the other tools that you love to use. So I would say the long-term vision is to create that hub and that experience that allows you to build, assemble the way you want and work with all the tools that you love.
Sarah Marince:
That’s awesome. You guys are on the right track
Blake Barnett:
Question for you need about like, cause like we, we already use Webster and like, see if we like found your services five years ago when we started with Webster, when Vimeo is promoting them and then just own them. But anyways what, how do we like, would it still be a good value for us regardless because, and, or is it easy to, I guess I just don’t think it’s easy to switch over. Once you have your clients on a certain platform, it’s easy to like move them over in. Cause I know we’ve done it once before, but do you think it would find a value if we just stayed on Wipster and just using your platform and as a project manager, as a project management tool, would, this is share the links to Wipster. I’m just trying to figure out my head how that would work. Yeah.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. You know, I mean, I would say that if your clients are familiar with Webster, they’re gonna be very familiar with assembles interface. In terms of, I assume you’re using Wipster primarily for video review and gathering feedback, right. I think that in terms of your client’s learning curve, if they’re used to Webster, it’s going to be very intuitive how to use assemble. And the benefit is that with assemble, you’re getting one seamless experience for them, the client. So they’re seeing the calendars, the task list, the scripts, the, that the cast, you know, all the way through to edits and final delivery all under one roof. And you’re also saving money because we’re enabling you to eliminate a few tools and bring, you know, just one subscription to handle everything.
Blake Barnett:
Okay. And then was another question a follow up was on, you mentioned that you used a HubSpot too. Is there any plans for you to build into that, that we can just import context directly from HubSpot or maybe other, you know, other platforms as well, just directly into assemble?
Nate Watkin:
Absolutely. Yeah. We would love to integrate with HubSpot or, you know, other
Joel Janecek:
Crms out there as well as, you know, invoicing and billing and things of that nature. There’s some great tools out there that a lot of people love. We, we would love to integrate with all those, you know, as much. And it’s our, it’s our goal to become that hub that connects with all the other tools that you love to use and brings it all together in one place.
Sarah Marince:
Okay. Sarah, do we have a question here from the audience we do from Taryn? Is there an offline function, a way to access a way to access most recent version in case internet isn’t available?
Joel Janecek:
That’s a great question and a great suggestion. Currently not an offline function we would love to in the future have a desktop app that you can actually download to your desktop, which would then provide some offline functionality. I think that would be a super cool feature, but currently we are all cloud-based at the most,
Sarah Marince:
I mean, without internet, we were just on the civilization anymore. I mean, you can’t survive. We need to have internet I’m without internet. What do I do? I don’t have internet
Joel Janecek:
You’ve mentioned budgeting – how’s how’s that working? You mentioned budgeting. Can you talk about that? I’m not seeing it. Is it coming? Is it coming feature? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s something that we’re gonna be creating is the ability to create budget documents. But once again, we want to make sure that that is customizable to the point that you can, you could budget how you like to punch it. Every production company budgets differently. I mean, even AICP bids, you know, they always come in differently somehow. So I think our assemble version is going to be less of a wizard of like a step-by-step, you know, build your budget and more of like an open type of templates or things that you can get you started, but are highly customizable. Yeah. Well, there’s always that element of like, you know, let’s say I’m managing five different editors and, you know, I think I’ve used or, or has been an end user of, you know, logging my time in, in a few different types of programs.
Joel Janecek:
You know, how many hours is this? How many hours is spent on that? And then like, you know, there’s the budget we, we send the clients and I know that we’ve sort of in a lot of budgets, I do, I’ve been like dialing back on line items and just kind of giving a general. And then the back end of that budget is like, okay, we’ve got 40 hours reading. We’ve got, you know, a 10 hour motion graphics or online or whatever. And then having that move towards the calendar where someone is like logging their time and that’s coming in and we can see, okay, you know, I’ve got this, you know, you’ve got your, your Gantt style chart, that’s moving across and you can get right to the end of this editors allotted time for this. So I can weave in, or maybe I’ve had to, you know, as we’ve all had to do, can you pick up that key pick up this?
Joel Janecek:
And so someone does an hour, another person does an hour, but it’s all adding up on that specific project, edit allotment. Yeah. Yeah. Is that, is that something you’re moving towards? They’re thinking about definitely time tracking, we’re looking into that’s going to be huge. So yeah, yeah. We’ll, we will certainly be releasing time tracking features in the future. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, cause with your camera, I love time tracking with a calendar. You know, like if I, if I could just look at entry and see, you see it adding up, you know, and then like if there’s a budget because you know, the budget’s so detached sometimes, like you say, it’s, it’s the AICP for, or it’s, you know, just I’ll, I’ll just usually whip up a quick Google sheet, but the client never saw that that’s for me to operability and to make sure that I’m maintaining you know, a certain degree of profitability, you know, we’re not going over, but that’s just, that just lives on an Island.
Joel Janecek:
It’s not really integrated with anything, you know, so getting degraded will be, I would love to see something like that happen where I don’t have a lot of other, you know, I could just sort of like be on a square in like a Google sheet or something if that’s integrated or some sort of like online Excel style form, and then, you know, assign this, our log man to this project in post-production offline, you know, that, that would be, yeah. Yeah. That’s a great suggestion. I liked that a lot, you know, we’re, we’re spit balling now.
Blake Barnett:
I mean, it’s interesting because like, I think all production companies and that’s where you said you want to keep it like really open and kind of loose because me and Joel totally disagree with how we want to do things. And so, and I think that’s like in the, the rest of the industry, but I know we have great if we did this one, like, no, I think it’d be great if we did it this way. And so it’s hard. And I think you guys have like a hard job, like figuring out the right way to do, to do it because I mean, there is no right way and we all kind of do it differently, but the more that we have tools that help us out. And so I feel like it’s like a big learning curve for you to, to like figure out the, how the majority of the people who are doing it maybe, or what works for everybody. And so like, don’t make any limit, you know, limiters, you know, it’s cause Joel likes to read a lot of texts. Like I don’t write a lot of, you know, and so, and he’ll get mad and be like, why make stuff? Like, I can’t write like paragraphs and paragraphs of text in this box. I’m like, well, it’s not, it’s not meant for that.
Blake Barnett:
It’s hard to make it, you know, keep everybody happy. And so,
Nate Watkin:
Yup. Yeah, yeah. You definitely hit the, hit the nail on the head there I think is, is there’s no right way. And so, you know, we need to continue to build open enough that people can do it their way.
Blake Barnett:
Great. where are we at Sarah?
Sarah Marince:
I think we covered a lot. I mean, this has been super informative and I think the screen-sharing was like really cool the way we were able to see how the site works. But yeah, I mean, I, we,
Nate Watkin:
We kind of covered everything
Blake Barnett:
Well, I mean, you asked them well, yeah, I mean, we kind of covered in random a beltway
Nate Watkin:
Random order. We covered a lot of stuff.
Blake Barnett:
I mean, one of the things, I guess we didn’t cause like there are tools like obviously project management tools and like, like, and we were never happy with them. Like we used, we tried a sauna and we tried another one too, and we never really, they just didn’t work out. Can you think of like, like the, the ways that you’re different? You know, I mean, I know that you’re different because you’re specifically for our industry, but like you showed and you showed us some features where he like showed us the calendar, which they don’t offer that they, I think it’s on a, started offered like some sort of calendar, but it wasn’t specific to our industry, but it was a similar to that really cool calendar that, you know, should they there something kind of like that I think. But yeah, I’m just trying to think of what different, big things that differentiate you from regular tools that are out there for, you know, the general, the general public, not our industry.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. I think the big differentiator and, and, and really what it all comes down to is when you, when you use those tools like asana or Trello or things like that, like they just don’t feel right. For some reason, you know, at all, producers can, can vouch for that. And I can, you know, in my former life as a producer and the reason for that is because all those tools were built for software development. Those tools were born out of the need to manage software projects. And that’s where asana came from. That’s where Trello came from where, where many of these tools came from. And then over time they, they, they grew and grew and grew to be able to handle a variety of different functions, but at their core, their project management platforms that were born out of the need to manage software developers and managing software for developers, couldn’t be further from managing creative production, content creation.
Nate Watkin:
And so I think the core difference with us is that we’re born out of content creation and we understand that our industry is very visual, highly visual. They love to, to just see the imagery, see the stuff they’re working on, see visual timelines see a variety of different things like that. And so aside from all the very like industry specific features that we’re adding into the platform, I think just the core basis of, of why this company was created, what makes it different and what makes it, you know, hopefully unique and better than, than others larger, you know, companies out there such as the sauna and those players.
Blake Barnett:
Well, and it’s funny that you said that, and I never really put two and two together, but when you said like a sauna and Trello they’re built for like coders or website developers and like, cause when we tried asana, I’m like, it didn’t work out at all for us as a production company, but we also, you know, we had a web team and I’m like, but it really works great for the web team, you know, but it’s just, we didn’t, we’re not like a really true web development company. We just do internally for our projects, but, but it did work good for them. And that was, but that was it. And we scratched it because it didn’t make sense for us overall as a company. Yeah,
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah. And every new feature we look at every new feature we build, we look at it through the lens of a producer and we say, you know, even with the calendar, something as simple as a calendar, we said, how can we make this better for a producer? And we interviewed dozens of producers and customers and ask them what features are you missing? And that’s how we approach everything that we build. So I think that is what truly differentiates us and we’ll make the product more and more unique as we continue to add features.
Blake Barnett:
Cool. Good deal. Joel, do you have anything else to add or
Joel Janecek:
No. No, thank you. Thank you though, Nate. I think it’s been a super interesting too to hear about it. I mean, it’s, it’s such an undertaking to develop something like that. W why did you pivot from production to deciding to do something like this? Was it what, what, what was the, what was the draw there?
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a deep question. And I, I don’t know if we have enough time for me to answer that, but it took, it took a lot of soul searching. Let me just put it that way. Production was my passion. I was also directing and screenwriting had had a screenplay option was, was wrapped as a, as a writer as well. And it was a turning point in my life where I think that I had to decide like, am I going to focus on the film, filmmaking and writing and all this, or am I going to follow something that I also feel passionate about, which is building products and specifically digital products. And that’s something that I’ve been passionate about since I was very young and it was hard, very hard decision to make to, to step away from the filmmaking world. And I do hope that someday I’ll be able to get back into it as a creative. But right now, just having a lot of fun building, building product and, and helping other people, you know, work better and work smarter.
Joel Janecek:
Nice. Where are you seeing most of your customers coming from? How are you marketing and how has that being as have been word of mouth, or has it been review sites, clutch, that sort of thing,
Blake Barnett:
You mean like more like, are you seeing it more from like independent producers, you know, or like agencies or production companies, like it’s like, like, is it skew like, you know, like heavier in one way or the other, or,
Nate Watkin:
Yeah, I can answer both questions in one, I think a lot of word of mouth you know, we’re, we’re, we’re really about product led growth. So, you know, once you use the product, you know, the naturally you share it with other people, right? You share it with your crew, you share it with your client. And so, and then a lot of our customers just share it by word of mouth because they, they really liked the product. So we’re seeing a lot of growth coming through word of mouth, and we hope that continues. And then in terms of the types of customers a lot of boutique production we were getting a ton of great shops signing up that are producing great branded work or writing different things. But then also,
Blake Barnett:
And the reason why I think that is, is because like price point wise, like to pay for Wipster or to pay for frame IO, like just alone, just come, and then you get these other features, you know? And so I, I think you’re less, you know, I’m not, maybe I’m wrong, but I think that your pricing is actually less than Wipster or frame IO on its own. And maybe, maybe I’m not correct on that, but I think if not, it’s close.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Yeah. I, it, yeah, I think frame IO switched to user based pricing now, so you pay per seat. So it would depend on how many users you have. So yeah, no, I mean, we, we want to be competitive there in pricing. And yeah, so, but yeah, a lot of, a lot of boutique production companies, we also have some, some very, very large media companies using it now, agencies, some brands so really just anybody with producer, but a producer title. But I think, you know, just because of my history, you know, our, our heart and soul is really those boutique production companies. And that’s really who we work with every day and are getting feedback from every day.
Blake Barnett:
I think we’re pretty much finished up. I mean, I don’t see any other questions if anybody, the audience has a last minute question, I’ll be super.
Sarah Marince:
But in the Q and A box, we had a lot of great questions today. Very active Q and A box, but yeah, if we, if we don’t thank you so much, Nate, this was, this was awesome
Blake Barnett:
New tools that are coming out, you know, and especially when it’s more fun when they’re specifically for our industry, cause like it’s cool, like the senior tools, but when they’re for our industry, it’s like extra cool that we kind of like look and dive in and kind of see what they’re doing. And so we appreciate it for sure that the put all the time and effort into building something specifically for our industry.
Nate Watkin:
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me love what you guys are doing as well with your community and these events are awesome. Thank you for inviting me.
Sarah Marince:
Shoots.Video and I feel like it would be a mistake if we didn’t plug Brick Madness here.
Blake Barnett:
And you have a copy of the DVD in front of me, but yeah. Watch Brick Madness on Amazon.
Sarah Marince:
You haven’t, you have to watch Brick Madness. That’s your homework. But yeah. Thank you so much, Nate. And as always I’m Sarah Morenci, you can find me@ sarahmarince.com and on Instagram at Sarah Marince and I guess we will see you all next time.
Nate Watkin:
Awesome. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you.
Sarah Marince:
You might be looking at Shoots.Video and thinking. So how does this all work? Is this about a setting up the whole crew? For me B just giving me options and having me handle it or see something in between. Well, it’s D all of the above to put it simply, we’re here to help you in any way that we can to get the crew and talent you need for your next production. We believe that every level of video can benefit from a well-maintained list of qualified crew members for every position. This goes for pre-pro onset and for post, every project is different. So if you need a producer to help manage the decision making process, then we can totally do that. If you’re already a producer and want to build your own crew from scratch, then go for it. We’re here to make your next production a success. And if you are a crew or talent, looking for producers that want you, then you’ve come to the right place, sign up now and also leave a referral for any solid people that you know that are already on here. Thank you for considering shoots.video and happy shooting.
